Hm, that bug was addressed, at least on CentOS 5.2 by Karabir Singh and RH released a fix too - 18 months ago... I saw that blog when it originally came out.

Absolutely: CentOS, Red Hat and company made the necessary fixes (after a blogger raised hell). But my point is that the fixes for the Perl problem were available in November 2007, and the fix only made it into these distros in August 2008 (or later). That's not good enough, and that's why I don't like being dependent on a vendor's Perl.

I'm not even picking on Red Hat per se - feel free to mention Debian and ssh keys, if you like. I just feel that if I have to do a lot of work with Perl (or Ruby or what-have-you), I want the control of compiling my own. As an added bonus, in my experience, a local Perl plus a very simple cron job involving CPAN::Mini has made my life with modules entirely pain free.